Points Made in Siddhartha

Siddhartha discovers many ways to enlightenment by the various paths he decides to take during his life. He learns many things but I think a few of them are more important than the others. He learns that you must experience all things to understand them, that enlightenment is an individual path, and that love and pain are essential parts of human existence.

You must experience all things to understand them. This is true to all of us. For example, you can't say that you understand how a homeless person feels, begging on the streets, unless you have actually been there and done that. Me personally, I have not experienced a situation like that but I could only imagine what it feels like. I have been in other situations that could be applied to this though. When I was in my pre-teens my parents owned a restaurant in Massachusetts. There was an apartment over the restaurant where my sister, my brother and I would stay while my parents were working. Occasionally I would go downstairs and get myself into a bit of trouble by walking behind the bar or getting in peoples way in the kitchen. The wait staff was always rushing around and looking stressed. I couldn't understand why. It was just waiting tables. But now I am busing in a restaurant on York Beach and just the busing job can be very tiring. I never realized how every little thing counts in a high-end restaurant. One tiny mistake, and food can be comped, resulting in the restaurant losing money.

Enlightenment is an individual path. This is especially true to everyone. Enlightenment cannot be taught to you and you must learn it yourself. A person telling you how it is and actually going to do it yourself are two completely different things. In a math class the teacher will tell you how to do equations and demonstrate it. If you never sit down and figure it out yourself then you'll never learn it. You'll just have someone else's knowledge. When I learned how to ride a bike I watched my parents ride a bike first. If I had just looked at them and declared that I knew how to ride a bike I would be wrong. I had to get on the bike, and despite falling down multiple times, I learned through the errors. The path to enlightenment requires that you do things for yourself.

Love and pain are essential parts of human existence. We all know this well because we have experienced love and pain in our lives. Without it we wouldn't know what love is or what pain is and just like the example above, we must experience these things ourselves. Somebody can't tell us what it feels like and we can't look at someone else and know. We have to feel pain and feel love throughout our lives or else we aren't human.